Topics

Privacy

Privacy (from Latin: privatus "separated from the rest, deprived of something, esp. office, participation in the government", from privo "to deprive") is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively. The boundaries and content of what is considered private differ among cultures and individuals, but share basic common themes. Privacy is sometimes related to anonymity, the wish to remain unnoticed or unidentified in the public realm. When something is private to a person, it usually means there is something within them that is considered inherently special or personally sensitive. The degree to which private information is exposed therefore depends on how the public will receive this information, which differs between places and over time. Privacy partially intersects security, including for instance the concepts of appropriate use, as well as protection of information. Privacy may also take the...

862 Recent Stories

We've all got plenty of questions for National Security Administration leaker Edward Snowden -- and now is our chance to ask him directly. Snowden will appear on The Guardian's website for a question-and-answer session with readers at 11 a.m. ET Mond...

Before allegedly becoming part of the secret National Security Agency surveillance program PRISM, Yahoo fought against it in court, in what was until now a secret challenge. The company eventually lost and had to comply, according to new reports. Thi...

Thanks to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, we learned last week about a secret NSA program called PRISM. The program allegedly allows the U.S. government to access the data of foreign users using services...

How did whistleblower Edward Snowden steal all those top secret documents from a secure National Security Agency facility in Hawaii? Simple: with a good old-fashioned flash drive. That's allegedly how Snowden, who was working at the facility as a con...

If you were hoping for more Internet companies to come out and reveal more details about government surveillance, like Google did on Tuesday, we have bad news for you. Asked on Wednesday about how it handles requests stemming from the Foreign Intelli...

Something new happened in Congress on Wednesday: Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called out a reporter's tweets in real time. The callout came during a Senate committee hearing originally intended to ...

Americans offer very different opinions about the National Security Agency's surveillance programs depending on whether they're framed in terms of terrorism, a comparison of two national polls reveals. A Pew/Washington Post study published Monday sug...

Edward Snowden said he wants "the courts and people of Hong Kong" to decide his fate in a new interview published Wednesday. "I have had many opportunities to flee Hong Kong, but I would rather stay and fight the United States government in the court...

Following Google's lead, on Tuesday both Microsoft and Facebook released statements requesting the U.S. government's permission to publish data and be more transparent about surveillance. Earlier Tuesday, after last week's revelations about the NSA s...

Facebook has nothing to do with PRISM. That's what Mark Zuckerberg said for a second time on Tuesday. At Facebook's annual shareholder meeting, the company's founder and CEO said pretty much what he said last week. SEE ALSO: PRISM: Does the NSA Reall...

A group of 86 civil liberties groups and Internet companies has launched a website called StopWatching.us to demand an end to NSA surveillance and ask Congress to open an investigation into the snooping. The coalition is comprised of companies like R...

After last week's reports that Internet companies are allegedly collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) and letting it wiretap foreign users' communications, Google is taking a step forward. On Tuesday, the search giant sent a letter to...

Just because something is legal doesn’t necessarily make it a good thing. So far, legality is the main rationale U.S. officials have used to defend the government’s PRISM spying program. It’s all perfectly legal, approved by Congress and the courts. ...

According to the latest survey conducted by the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, a slight majority of Americans -- 56% -- think it's "acceptable" for the NSA to systematically track their call records in terrorism investigations. Only 41%...

The NSA leaks perpetrated by Edward Snowden will easily go down as one of the biggest revelations of the year, if not the decade. But the episode also raises new questions about the risk that insiders pose to government and corporate cybersecurity, i...

Who is Edward Snowden, the admitted source for multiple outlets' reports on the National Security Agency's surveillance programs? SEE ALSO: 10,000+ People Want Obama to Pardon Edward Snowden While many details of Snowden's life are yet to be uncovere...

Edward Snowden has fans among the Chinese, who know a thing or two about Internet surveillance. In leaking information about a top-secret U.S. government data collection program, Snowden argued that an increasingly authoritarian government could use ...

Many people are scrambling to increase online security after the news of PRISM, a surveillance program that grants the NSA access to users' data on at least nine major websites, leaked last week. But there's one major roadblock to hiding online data....

You're sick of all the mainstream social networks. The constant baby pictures, your oh-so-in-love couple friends, your creepy co-worker who Likes every single one of your photos. If you want to trim down your social networking, or if you would rather...

The source for British newspaper The Guardian's recent groundbreaking reports on the National Security Agency's surveillance practices unexpected revealed himself Sunday as Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old Booz Allen Hamilton employee who's been working...

What we know about the National Security Agency's PRISM Internet surveillance program is in flux, seemingly changing by the hour. If you're just tuning in Sunday and you're looking for our latest understanding of PRISM, this post is for you. 1. Does ...

Yahoo has joined a chorus of Silicon Valley companies posting detailed denials of reports they are voluntarily sharing users' information with the government under a secret program called PRISM. Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell posted the following mes...

The NSA has a tool that records and analyzes all the flow of data that the spy agency collects around the world. Think of it as a global data-mining software that details exactly how much intelligence, and of what type, has been collected from every ...

Remember that time you did a Facebook search of your partner's ex? And before that, when you had a huge crush on your sweetie, you'd check his or her profile page slightly too often. Oh, and recall that other time when you had a leeettle too much win...

Information obtained under the National Security Agency's recently revealed PRISM Internet surveillance program foiled a planned terrorist attack on New York City's subway system, according to a report. The information helped prevent an "Islamist mil...

Did tech giants like Google, Facebook or Apple really give the NSA unfettered access to their user's data? On Thursday, almost all of them denied that. On Friday, Google's CEO Larry Page came forward to clarify and reiterate that Google has nothing t...

The public has been in an uproar after reports revealed that Verizon has been providing telephone records of millions of its subscribers with the National Security Agency (NSA). Another report acknowledged that major Internet companies, such as Faceb...

Confused about this week's deluge of news about the NSA's secret surveillance programs? Start here. It began on Wednesday, with the revelation that Verizon had received a secret court order requesting it to give the National Security Agency access to...

For years, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore., pictured) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) have been dying to tell us about the NSA's secret data-gathering methods. Wyden called the phone records gathering program something "I have been concerned about for years" in a T...

On Friday afternoon, President Obama responded for the first time to the revelations of various National Security Agency data gathering programs—from recording all call records in and outside of the United States, to the PRISM program, which reported...

The Next Big Thing

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.